anonymo's Journal: Mapping the social network on Slashdot

I use friend modifier as a filtering tool: friends has +2 modifier points and friends of my friends has +1 modifier point.
This way I can elevate people who had imho interesting comments or articles.

I has too little spare time to write a program that could create a map of the social network of friends and foes.
It could have a default to find the tops: the most popular/hated person(s) and the person(s) who got most fans/freaks.
It could have another option to map the relations of a specific user.

Creating a visual output as a speudo-map in html as a platform-independent program would be nice.

It's been done before

[daniil]

Or, rather, it has been tried before, but I'm not sure someone ever actually finished coding such a program. And at least one person(FortKnox, I think) got his IP banned for hammering the Slashdot servers when trying to map the zoo system. Unfortunately, all I could find was some people mentioning it in this JE [slashdot.org] by turg from a year and a half ago (which also includes some stats of fans).

Re:It's been done before

[anonymo]

Thanks, the shell script is just an embryo.
I wish there was a bit more advanced program for that.
BTW: I,ve found a VHS in the local library, Derke Jarman's Wittgenstein.
I will watch it tomorrow...

Maybe this will give you a start

[dexterpexter]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=109173&thresho ld=1&commentsort=0&tid=124&mode=thread&pid=9278410 #9283118 [slashdot.org]

from the same discussion the user above mentioned. Good luck!

Re:Maybe this will give you a start

[anonymo]

Thanks, I 've got a link to it from daniil.
It's just an embryo compared to what I'm looking for.
Of course the most effective would be to have this kind of stats in the Slashcode. Even better elevating/lowering moderators automagically by a ranking system. :)

To avoid a ban an outsider program should have some (random) pause in it between queries.
I think it is more convenient to create 2 programs: one that crawls the Slashdot journals an grabbing user info and creates a list, and another that starts with a sp

Re:Maybe this will give you a start

[arb]

Around the time of that thread I toyed with a Java graphing tool and got some interesting results. Starting from a single user, it would fetch their friends and display them on a map - clicking other people would expand their friends and you could navigate your way around the Slashdot zoo. I don't think I have the code handy any more though...

Re:Maybe this will give you a start

[anonymo]

Sounds like a possible solution I was looking for...

Re:Maybe this will give you a start

[arb]

I found some old code, but the friends scraper no longer works due to the CSS rejig. If I get a chance over the next few days I will try to fix it and get things working again...

Re:Maybe this will give you a start

[anonymo]

It would be nice! I quit programming for ca. 10 years ago. I do just scripts in sh and perl as sysadmin.
I'm looking foward you program! :-)

Put me on the list of people you notify when done

[DG]

Danka.

DG

Re: Danka

[anonymo]

Sorry?

Re: Danka

[DG]

No, "thanks".

DG

Re: Danka

[anonymo]

You're wellcome, except I don't know for what?
I did not wrote a mapping program (yet). There are 2 stages of that:
1. Collect the data without getting banned on Slashdot. This is the easier part. There should be 2 progs for that: one that scans all Slashdot accounts and finds the tops. The other one a bit more complex finding out relations to some degree (digging down 3 levels would be enough I think)
2. Visualising the 2nd alternative. I have to find an simple but effective way to display the data.

Motivate m